Days of Infamy (34 page)

C
ORPORAL
T
AKEO
S
HIMIZU
stood in a long line at a Japanese field post office in Honolulu. The package he carried was addressed to his parents. The line moved with the glacial pace of post-office lines everywhere. He didn't care. He'd expected nothing different. Sooner or later, he'd get to the front of it. He didn't have anything else going on in the meantime.

At last, he came up to a clerk. The man looked even more bored than Shimizu felt. “Contents of the package?” he asked. By his tone, he couldn't have cared less.

“Souvenirs of war: an American flag and a bayonet I took from the rifle of a dead Yankee,” Shimizu answered. “I want my honorable parents to see that I have not been idle here.”

The postal clerk grunted. Had he seen any combat while the Japanese were overrunning Oahu? Shimizu wouldn't have bet on it. Some people always managed to land soft jobs behind the lines. The clerk threw the package on a scale. “Postage is seventy-five sen,” he announced.

Shimizu gave him a one-yen coin and got his change. The clerk put stamps on the package. They were, Shimizu saw, American stamps. But they had a blue overprint that said
Hawaii
in Japanese characters. One was also overprinted
50
, the other
25
.

“Our islands now,” Shimizu said, not without a certain pride. He'd earned the right to be proud, as far as he was concerned. The Hawaiian Islands were Japanese now because of him and men like him.

“
Hai
.” The clerk sounded indifferent. He didn't quite yawn in Shimizu's face, but he came close. What were you to do with such people?
Yes, my friend, have you ever seen machine-gun fire?
Shimizu wondered.
How would you like it if you did? Would you still be bored? I doubt it
.

He stepped away from the clerk. Another Japanese soldier walked up with a bigger, heavier package than the one he'd just mailed. What was in that one?
Clothes, maybe
, Shimizu thought. Shirts and trousers would make very good spoils of war to send home.

When Shimizu went outside, a white woman was walking up the street toward him. She hastily dipped her head—it wasn't much of a bow, but it would do—and got out of his way. He walked past her as if she didn't exist. He'd never seen a white woman before he landed on Oahu. He could count the times he'd seen white men on the fingers of one hand.

A local Japanese man about his own age who wore American-style clothes
did a better job of bowing. With him, Shimizu felt he could unbend a little: “This is the prettiest country in the world. You're lucky to live here all the time.”

“Please talk slow,” the local said. “Talk only little Japanese. So sorry.” He wasn't kidding. He didn't just have a peasant accent, either. He had the sort of accent an English-speaker would. He might look Japanese on the outside, but he was American where it counted.

Corporal Shimizu felt betrayed. “Why didn't your parents teach you the way they should have?” he asked angrily.

The young man flinched as if Shimizu had threatened him with a bayonet. “So sorry,” he said again. He sounded tolerably Japanese when he brought out the stock phrase. But then he went on, fumbling for words and butchering his grammar: “Grandfather, grandmother come here. Father, mother born here. They speak Japanese with grandfather, grandmother, speak English with me. Speak Japanese when no want I to know what they meaning. I learn some, not much. English number one here.”

“Disgraceful,” Shimizu said. What was even more disgraceful was that the young local didn't even understand the word. Shimizu tried again: “Bad.”

Yes, the local got that. He bowed again, repeating, “
Gomen nasai
.” Shimizu didn't care if he was sorry or not. He jerked his thumb down the street. The young man hurried away.

When Shimizu got back to his company's encampment, he was still in a foul mood. “What's the matter, Corporal-
san
?” Shiro Wakuzawa asked. “You look like you could bite nails in two.”

“I'll tell you, that's how I feel,” Shimizu said. The story of the young man who could hardly speak Japanese poured out of him. “And he was happy that way!” he raged. “Happy! English number one here, he said—‘English
ichi-ban
.” He mocked the way the local spoke. “And he couldn't even understand when I told him what a disgrace he was.”

“So sorry, Corporal,” Wakuzawa said. That did nothing to make Shimizu feel better. It just reminded him of the Hawaiian Japanese stuttering apologies. Private Wakuzawa went on, “Everything is pretty crazy here, though. Some of the policemen in Honolulu are Koreans. Koreans, if you can believe it! And everybody, even the Japanese, even the whites, has to do what they say.”

“Koreans? That is crazy,” Shimizu agreed. Korea had been part of the Japanese Empire longer than he'd been alive. Any Japanese knew Koreans were
hewers of wood and drawers of water, and that was about all. They got drafted into the Army, but as laborers and prison guards. They weren't good for anything else. Shimizu wouldn't have wanted to go into battle alongside Koreans with rifles in their hands. He said, “Americans have to be a little screwy to let something like that go on. I bet we take care of it now that we're in charge.”

“I hope so, Corporal,” Wakuzawa said. “If anybody thinks I'm going to do what some Korean tells me to do, he'd better think twice.”

“Oh, no.” Shimizu shook his head. “Maybe they call themselves Americans, not Koreans. I don't care if they do. Maybe they call themselves policemen. I don't care about that, either. We are soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army. We obey no one except our superiors in the Army. If some Korean cop—or even a real American cop—tries to tell you what to do, kick him in the teeth.”

Wakuzawa was a skinny little fellow with a ready smile. He couldn't look very fierce no matter how hard he tried. But he did his best now. “
Hai
, Corporal-
san!
” he said, and mimed a kick at someone taller than he was.

Shimizu laughed out loud. “I don't think you'd get him in the
teeth
with that, but it would probably do the job.” He slapped the private on the back. In Japan, that would have been an unheard-of familiarity between noncom and first-year soldier. Here in easygoing Hawaii, it seemed natural enough.

K
ENZO AND
H
IROSHI
Takahashi used shovels and rakes and hoes to clear rubble from the streets of Honolulu. Till the
Oshima Maru
put to sea with sails taking the place of her engine, that was the most use they could be. The job also paid well: three full meals a day, plus a dollar.

The work was steady, if you liked that sort of thing. Kenzo didn't. “Is this why we graduated from high school?” he asked bitterly, filling the shovel full of broken bits of brick and dumping them into a waiting wheelbarrow.

His older brother shrugged and added a shovelful of his own. “It's what we've got,” Hiroshi answered. “If we don't pitch in, the town just stays a mess.”

“Yeah, I suppose so,” Kenzo said. He and Hiroshi didn't just speak English—they made a point of speaking English. He wondered if it was a point the rest of the men in the labor gang understood, or even cared about. Like any outfit in Honolulu, the rubble-clearing party had men of every blood
and every mix of bloods in it. Some of them used English, some the pidgin that did duty for English among those who didn't speak it very well, and some the languages of their homelands. The straw boss was a Hawaiian Japanese who was fluently profane in both his own language and an English that was almost but not quite pidgin.

“No waste time!” the straw boss shouted. “You waste your time, you waste my time. You waste my time, you be sorry!”

This was harder work than fishing. Kenzo hadn't thought anything could be. It never got as frantic as pulling tuna off the line and gutting them one after another, but it never let up, either. One shovelful after another, the whole day long . . . “The guys who built the Pyramids worked like this,” he said.

Hiroshi shook his head. “They didn't have wheelbarrows.”

Kenzo grunted. He sounded very much like his father when he did it, though he would have brained anybody who said so with his shovel. He said, “Well, you're right. It could be worse. I wouldn't've believed it.”

“Keep an eye peeled for cans,” Hiroshi added. “Guys who built the Pyramids didn't have those, either.”

This time, Kenzo refused to back down. “They didn't know how lucky they were,” he said.

The rule was that any cans found intact had to go into the communal food store. Nobody paid attention to the rule unless Japanese soldiers were close by to enforce it. Otherwise, an older rule prevailed: finders keepers. Of course, half the time you didn't know what you'd found till you got it open. Labels didn't last, not when big chunks of the city had turned into wasteland. Corned-beef hash? Canned peaches? Tomato soup? Nobody was fussy, not these days.

Every so often, Japanese soldiers would march past. When they did, the laborers had to stop what they were doing and bow. Kenzo ground his teeth at showing the invaders a respect he didn't feel. Like most Japanese his age in Hawaii, he'd always felt more ties with America than with the old country. Japan had been something for his father to talk about nostalgically. But the war had made sure no
haole
, no Chinese, no Korean—nobody—would ever treat him as anything but a damn Jap.

After lowering his spade one more time to bow to some soldiers, he noticed something interesting. “You see what I see?” he asked Hiroshi in a voice not much above a whisper.

“What's that?” his brother said, just as quietly.

“They don't come around by ones or twos any more,” Kenzo said. “They're always in bunches—like bananas.”

“Heh,” Hiroshi said—about as much laughter as the crack deserved. “I can tell you how come, if you really want to know.”

“Sure,” Kenzo said. “Spit it out.”

Hiroshi paused till the straw boss went by. He didn't stop shoveling. Neither did Kenzo. The straw boss went on to yell at somebody else. The two Takahashis looked busy enough to suit him. Once he'd moved out of earshot, Hiroshi said, “They don't go around by ones or twos any more because they got knocked over the head when they did—always where nobody could see anything or find out what happened.”

“Yeah?” Kenzo asked eagerly.

“Yeah,” his brother said. “No way to take hostages or anything when they haven't got any idea who done it.” He threw another shovelful of wreckage into the wheelbarrow, then stopped when he took a look at Kenzo's face. “Don't you go getting any dumb ideas, now!” He wagged a finger at Kenzo.

“If I'm going to knock anybody over the head, I'll start with Dad,” Kenzo said. Hiroshi snorted as if he'd been joking. To show he wasn't, he went on, “Even after what they did to Mother, he still went to their stinking parade.”

“Hell, you know Dad,” Hiroshi said. “He stands up and whinnies when he hears ‘Kimigayo.' ”

That made Kenzo snort. It damn near made him giggle. He could picture his father—picture him all too well—as an aging cart horse responding to the Japanese national anthem. “Damn you,” he said, still snorting. “Now I'm going to want to give him a lump of sugar whenever I see him.”

“Well, go ahead,” Hiroshi said. “We're short on all kinds of stuff, but we've got sugar. Sugar and pineapple. How long can we eat 'em?”

“Here's hoping we don't have to find out, that's all.” When Kenzo thought about food, he didn't feel like joking any more. He went back to work. If he was busy, he wouldn't have to think so much. And laborers were getting fed well . . . so far, anyhow.

Japanese soldiers weren't the only people on the streets. There were also scroungers, men and women picking through the ruins for whatever they could grab. Both laborers and soldiers chased them when they saw them. But the scroungers were like mongooses; they were good at not being seen.

And there were ordinary people trying to lead ordinary lives in times that were anything but ordinary. They often had a faintly lost air, as if they not only couldn't believe how much things had changed but also refused to acknowledge it. Most of the people like that seemed to be
haoles
. They'd been on top so long, they'd come to take it for granted. They didn't know how to cope now that Hawaii was under new management. They seemed to think this was all a bad dream. They'd wake up pretty soon, and everything would be fine. Except it wouldn't.

Kenzo froze with his shovel in midair. Up the street toward him came Elsie Sundberg and a couple of other girls. The last time she'd seen him, she'd pretended she hadn't. The memory of that still burned. Would she do it again? He didn't think he could stand it if she did, even though she wasn't exactly his girlfriend and never had been.

He knew just when she recognized him. She half missed a step, then turned to one of her friends and said something Kenzo was too far away to catch. The other girls just shrugged, which told him nothing.